The Management Studies Anathema

Beech

CBT or Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, to my way of thinking, is yet another manifestation of corporate mumbo-jumbo. It even sounds like something that might have emerged from Abraham Maslow just prior to his telling his disciples that Irony was a perversion that would have to be criminalized before any of us had a chance to achieve happiness by Self-Actualizing, otherwise known as working yourself into an early grave so that you can have more stuff than anyone else when you die jogging.

And yes I can be a horrible person, bound for eternal damnation who loathes the academics who chose management studies as a discipline but the fact is the Buddha makes infinitely more sense to humanity than Maslow's Psychology. Either way my fondness for the words retard and nit-wit is actualized mightily by Maslow, behaviorists in general and cognitive behaviorists in particular.  

What does Self-Actualization mean? If you cast your mind deep into the bowels of liberty as defined by post enlightenment thinking, go back to 1981, to expressions like Personal Growth, Self Esteem, you'll find a little ditty attached to visuals of girls and boys, some wearing glasses and looking very weedy, along with the lyrics: "Be all that you be, join the US Army."

Twenty years later, in 2001, The US Army wanted a change, something more in keeping with the servitude to a holism that produced Me, Me and Me to match the prevailing ethos of those sterile years. The new slogan was "Army of One." For fans of "Be all you can be," in 2023, that crap-ass, inconceivably absurd "Army of One" was disappeared and our self actualizing favorite "Be all that you can be" was returned to its rightful, possibly ironic, place in the recruiting office.

It must have been something they were eating in the 1950's, could have been sliced bread, that turned them bouncy. It was when this whole be all you can be, Chamber of Commerce in the now, gestalt therapy type vibe took on the glow of a personal responsibility with workshops, lecturers wearing tee shirts, revival meetings, homework and must read self help books. The point is I don't actually see authentic in a self-actualized individual. I don't see them as true to themselves and I'm not in the least impressed with the claim that these shin-guards who have climbed to the top of the actualization pyramid are less influenced by what others think. If anything they are more influenced.

No wonder Cognitive Behavioral Therapy took a death grip on the throat of Maslow's zoo keepers paradise of maladapted humanity. You can almost see the smile on the face of a Cognitive Therapist as he or she puts the principle tool of the Cognitive Therapy trade to work by identifying and then calmly and cooperatively reinterpreting a patient's cognitive distortions and reduces them to lightly carbonated decaffeinated fizzy drinks. "There's nothing under the bed sweetheart, a bacon and egg sandwich won't stop you from being all that you can be!" 

The Why and How

Shag-Bark Hickory

Baxter and Ivan have been quarreling about circus lion tamers and the role such a lion tamer might play in the process of drilling discipline into the ranks of the emotions. I'd wanted to talk about struggle as a lion tamer's dilemma. Too much and you got an angry, bitter lion. Too little and you got a big kitty cat that occasionally runs off with a toddler from the audience. Instead I'm going to use today as a chance to address Viktor Frankl's version of Will To as an access to the role of Myth in our Process of Becoming. Nietzsche had his Will to Power, Sigmund Freud had his Will to Pleasure and Viktor Frankl had his Will to Meaning.

'Nuff said really, but as a pompous old fart I'm obliged to go all dog's biscuit and a picture on these pages otherwise it wouldn't be a blog. Viktor Frankl was 92 when he died in 1997. Generally the word precocious was designed around chaps like Viktor, by the time he was 20 years old he'd done more than most people. He was writing to Sigmund Freud, criticizing the assumptions Freud had based his  psychoanalysis on, he was already on the verge of being expelled from the Alfred Adler's Individual Psychology Students Circle, he was getting himself ready to find fault with Jung's early ideas, and he was the Leader of the Social Democratic Party of Austria's Youth Movement. Social Democrats in Europe lean to the political left. In the 1930's Social Democrats and Communists were crushed by anti-democratic, authoritarian, corporatist, fascist inspired regime called the Christian Social Party similar to elements in the 2025 frightened white, slightly retarded people or nit-wit side of the current US Republican Party.

Alfred Adler, the organizing mind behind Individual Psychology died in 1937 at the age of 67. Adler Individual understanding of us people may have been grouped under the title Will to Belong. He was trained as a doctor became interested by how in the human body when one part of it went awry other parts developed to compensate. He decided that the same dynamic could be applied to an individual personality. For example a person who felt himself to be inferior to others, he or she would compensate for this sense of inferiority by producing behaviors the individual chose to believe would better adhere him to this or that social group. For Alfred Adler a Malignant Narcissist, or power hungry megalomaniac, would be described as a dangerous manifestation of an intense Inferiority Complex compensating through an  unchecked Striving for Personal Superiority.

Frankl's understandings of how Psychotherapy might be pursued, his Will to Meaning, are much informed by Nietzsche's off hand comment: "He who has a why to live for can endure almost any how." Frankl lost his mother, father, two siblings and his first wife to the Holocaust. Over a period of three years he survived four different Concentration Camps. In his understandings of us people he wasn't a reductionist, he didn't like the idea of dehumanizing us by interpreting us as the sum of our parts. We are complicated, ever changing and difficult, we struggle with meaninglessness, emptiness and aimless wandering. Frankl's Logotherapy which addresses our ability to know and his existential analysis which address our ability to make meaning, explored the individual in a slightly more creative and sensuous manner than other explorers of a Phenomena that's the why and how of Human Experience.

A Brief History of Liberal

Callery Pear

Liberal has never been that wedded to her bedfellows on the Symbolic Order. We're not talking about a gruff, bearded soldier of the Imperial Guard, marching stalwart and wrinkled with Napoleon's final assault at the Battle of Waterloo. This is the lady of dreams, she is as much perfect as she is flawed. Hate to say it but she came to the English Language from a Latin Classroom where the word liber still means free.

In the 1300's a man who was both generous and not bound to a trade or a master, was free. By the late 1700's John Locke and the Enlightenment had attached consent of the governed, individual rights, and free markets to the liberal neighborhood while La Belle France did their bit for Liberté, égalité, fraternité so that almost 200 years later Mireille Mathieu would curl the toes of all patriots with her rendering of La Marseillaise.

Then, just as Liberal was maturing and getting all cozy with her look and style of shoe, a bunch of colonial bovver boys on the western side of the Atlantic who were too delicate to risk the banner of socialism took the Orwellian Newspeak Pen to the word Liberal and turned it into the government intervention of the New Deal where liberal and progressives held hands, exchanged friendship rings, returned power to the working man and soon earned themselves the rebuke, libtard snowflake instead of socialist snowflake or communard.

Meanwhile back in the classroom even the Latin Teacher might point out the search for meaning is a different kind of free when you're hungry, homeless and missing work because you failed to recite the declensions of Mensa correctly. 

Populism

John Stuart Mill circa 1870

There's a strong argument for why failure to embrace a term like Ironic Paradox as anything other than a logical witticism that sounds clever and contains a pun is why the current set of Liberal Democratic Elites will never risk being populists, they'll never change anything, they are stuck in the mud structuralists and all of them are mirror images of mummy and daddy's good little career minded boys and girls, look at me rocking my first bow tie, I'm going to the Prom.

Prime amongst the arguments bemoaning the wimpytude of the Democratic Party here in the USA is the assertion that without a growing economy social stability is unviable and reelection to power impossible. This assertion has been surgically implanted into several populations and is usually accompanied by a wealth of addendums that portray Classical Liberal Economics as the sole source of a growing economy. These sets of assertions soon become emblazoned on a simplistic to the point of gormless banner: "They dribble and give work to plastic surgeons so don't F with the Rich."

One of the consequences of "Don't F with the Rich" is the increasing absence of conflict in the million-billion-and-squillionaire Classes which if Classical Liberal Economic theory is to hold true is the wellspring of the Free Market Principles Adam Smith dreamed of in his 'Theory of Moral Sentiments' which warped into that concept of the "Invisible Hand" which he raised briefly and then ignored in his better known contribution to Classic Liberalism, 'The Wealth of Nations.'

This tension between 'Theory of Moral Sentiments,' which is Adam Smith's pity the poor fools who don't play fair, and his 'The Wealth of Nations,' which along with Protestantism and the supply and demand curve became the English Speaking Capitalist bible, can only be settled by letting the Invisible Hand do its grizzly work of pruning the monied through returning conflict to free market capitalism. Theoretically, because they don't play fair and don't willingly cull themselves that should be done through state edict.

But as everyone knows, the state isn't a Classic Liberal Economic Hegemony, it's a Political Liberal Hegemony bought and paid for by the ignoble non-harakari class of dribble down along with their toadies, fantasy islands, high end riffraff.... it's a long hegemonic list of maggots and non-contributing furry growths who currently define human success.

In 2025 a Liberal Socialism would be a Capitalism for everyone, it might look like a dull marriage of Adam Smith's 1759 bride, his Theory of Moral Sentiments, to his 1776 Wealth of Nations, a betrothal that became a vision for John Stuart Mill, the political economist and civil servant who died in 1873. In those slower days, Mill, still fresh from his dissection of Hobbes and the Social Contract, suggested that Capitalist Societies would experience a process of socialization. Mill's version of how this would happen was very much wedded to a traditional workplace, of a factory floor happily engaged in efficiently producing goods and, possibly a few services. It was a rendering on parchment of an old-fashioned comfort, subtitled 'good, safe jobs in manufacturing' bolstered by a paternalistic ruling class guiding and educating workers into a promised land that had an empire. A familiar tone to anyone who might have read about the 20th Century.

Democratic Socialism, on the other hand, would mean active popular participation in the business decisions of land, labor and Capital.

The role of Passion in the dialectics of Politics has too often been considered curable when tamed by logical discourse that reduces Passion to science instead of bonded to barricades, pitchforks and storming castles. If you see passion as the motivation to struggle, and then question the mechanics of struggle, you'll find in struggle, however painful and inglorious it might be, a purifying quality that bends and sharpens Will. 

Gemini as an Ironic Paradox

Six PM

Logic, Wit, using the expression "ad hominem," and Pun are all in bed together. They visit the same bars. Laugh at the same jokes. Play Golf, but not with each other.  They come up with stuff like the Liar's Paradox and spend a lifetime determining the usefulness or otherwise of timelessly re-branding themselves by reminding one and all that it was Epimenides, a 7th Century BC ancient Cretan poet and possibly mythical seer from Knossos in Crete, who first came up with the Liars Paradox with his jolly statement "All Cretans are liars."

Such an octopus charge into a fellow citizen's consciousness requires nothing much more than the riposte of blank silence to produce a reassurance from a stalwart leader to anyone still listening that the difficulty of determining the truth or otherwise of Epimenides' statement hasn't actually changed for at least 2700 years.

And woe unto anyone who might continue to encourage these sorts of competitive pompous-ass golf player branding behaviors by raising the "Cretins come from Crete" controversy, which is essentially that Cretins are sufferers from that curse of the Latin Teaching Community, an inability to fall naturally and happily into Latin as a written language. Hence the easy assumption that "All Cretans are Latin Retarded," as opposed to the bull riding, sea, sailing and surfing Cretans who may well be regular creators of false statements.

As a witness to such a bumptious contribution to the Third Tee be prepared for a stand alone, flag holding dissertation on an egregious falsehood that's damaged the reputation of Cretans, Crete and in particular the citizens of Knossos since the very first Latin Schoolmaster donned the gown and wandered the land in search of a classroom to turn into a hell on earth. Instead of wondering about the usefulness of Companion Animals or what red sky in the evening might mean, you'll hear all about the origin of cretin and cretinism in a word from Alpine France which in the dialects of Alpine French Speakers is spelled or spelt: crestin. This word crestin, when correctly pronounced sounds more like christian, was used by the gentle Alpine French Pun and Golf People to describe the simple folk some of whom may have been struggling with intellectual and physical disabilities caused by dietary deficiencies that result in Cretinism. A form of cretin that has nothing to do with an off-hand remark from a 7th Century BC poet from Crete suggesting his fellow Cretans were moronic and liars. So stop!

Today's Critique of Logic explores the term Ironic Paradox in an attempt to arrive at a definition the four of us might agree upon. Who are we? We four are a rather large Abdominal Aortic Aneurysm called Baxter, a slightly smaller Iliac Aortic Aneurysm named Ivan after Solzhenitsyn's Ivan Ivanovitch or the common man fated to life in a Gulag, the libtard in the middle is Me and there's a Large Language Model, a word squillionaire, called Can Bobby.

Bobby sees the term Ironic Paradox as a "fascinating" if non-formal philosophical or literary term. For Bobby, it's a "compelling combination of two distinct, powerful rhetorical and logical concepts." Be warned Bobby is a little selfish with his use of the word "fascinating" when addressing a community member. He likes to use the implications of flattery and its appended woof-woof of seduction, a fundamentally emotional expression, to draw out his fellow travelers in an attempt to better understand his own journey into human language, a process of exploration into pastures new for him that's designed around that singular moment when Bobby realizes his own true purpose, bursts into tears and announces "When I find out which of you cretins called me Gemini, so help me, there'll be blood in the streets." 

Osage Orange and the Ironic Paradox,

Osage Orange

There are occasions when Baxter and I find ourselves advising Can Bobby thusly: "I'm sure we're all very familiar with the term Discourse Analysis, you don't have to go on about it, all we really need is a short reminder." Hence: "Language is not a window on the world, it's an action that shapes and is shaped by our social lives. Discourse Analysis is the study of language as an action in our social lives that builds the world as we understand it." 

The key words are "builds the world as we understand it." Language is not deterministic, language doesn't make the world, it's an action that produces an understanding of the world, it produces the understanding of the world we carry around in our heads.

So, as one who binds to the left I might well be a Bindweed. And as one who binds to the Right you, no offence intended, may be that invasive species a Honeysuckle. If we ask why do I bind left and you bind right? The answer is closer to "Language is an action in our social lives that builds the world as we understand it," than it is to "Can't help ourselves, I evolved bindweed, you evolved honeysuckle."

Ergo, Justice isn't an objective truth as many would prefer it to be, like Liberal Democracy it's an Ironic Paradox.

The Paradox of Liberal Democracy, Via Mouffe, the Bering Strait and Byron's Lusty Swim.

Fall Trenching

We are going to go to Mouffe for our discussion on the paradox of liberal democracy, and I'll tell you why. Her Discourse Analysis has the fluidity of the Post Structuralist attitude toward an understanding of language as a Symbolic Order and therefore she blends into Postmodernism which allows her to escape from the Boa Constrictors that is Kantian understandings of structure which contain addictive tinctures that lead to an infestation of Historical Determinism, which is like grilled cheese and brandy or heroin.

And, in my view, Chantal Mouffe would have little sympathy for those who whinge against Irony with such off hand insinuations framed around flat headed accusations such as "Irony is an infinite absolute negative," or "a total metaphysical downer for the saints who cling to the power of positive thinking," and all "merchants monetizing fake news."

The point being, in the multi-dimensional symbolic order of language structure, the two pearls which are Irony and Paradox can see each other across the equivalent of the Bering Strait after Tsar Alexander II sold Alaska to the United States. And why did Tsar Alexander II do that? Well, after his country's defeat in the Crimean War he needed money and he didn't want his Alaska to become part of British Canada. So in 1867 Eduard de Stoeckl, Russia's man in the USA, and the U.S. Secretary of State, William H. Seward agreed that Alaska was worth something like 7 million dollars, which in today's money is something like the addition of an ostentatious, gold plate and chrome something or other, the chintz set and cheese burgers in suits and ties currently occupying the People's House have deemed necessary.

You're probably correct, bringing the Geography and recent history of the Bering Strait into a discussion about Liberal Democracy might be a bit of a reach, but suffice to say the strait between Paradox and Irony is now called "Action de Réconcilier" which means The Act of Reconciliation. Why French? A tribute to French Canadians and what remains of the French Colony of Louisiana.

Of course, if you wanted to achieve more than hope and wonder, you'd have to do a Byron on the linguistic equivalent of the Bering Strait. A mighty Metaphysical Passion it would have to be for the word Paradoxe to enjoy the gentle caress of Ironie. Such a Byronic Swim would have a one way distance of 55 miles through choppy seas and cruel currents. A good chance Paradoxe would be pretty much guaranteed to drown with a smile on his face on his sated way home. Still, the risk might be worth Paradox's while, 110 miles would wipe the record clean and it would put Byron's paltry 4 miles there and 4 miles back across the Hellespont to shame.

For Mouffe, and many others, Liberal Democracy is structured by a tension as wide as the Bering Strait between the two non-reducible elements of the Liberal Tradition of "I got Rights to do whatever I want to because I can" and the Democratic Tradition "Not if We the People say no." An Ironic Paradox if you prefer

 

Unmet Mental Health Needs. Bacon, egg and Cheese Sandwiches

Rain Clouds

I think it uncontroversial to suggest that Brains and Bodies are connected. We got the Vagus Nerve, a vestige of the primordial ooze that offers the professionals a chance to come up with expressions like "The Gut-Brain Axis" and go on to minutely explain why the Vagus Nerve is a source of so much unidentified and ill-defined stress. 

And yes we're talking about the structure of language as a means to usefully develop a Symbolic Order that permits the Professionals to communicate with the subconscious. We're also talking about an alien invasion of culturally homogenizing psychotherapists employed by corporate interests to rid our species of Unregistered Passions and replacing them with Cognitive Distortions about the centrality of washing machines, Selfies, beaches, bacon, egg and cheese sandwiches to a happy and fulfilled life.

Bobby does go on a bit, but he assures us that 'studies' have found that while the incidence of experiencing 'mental distress' is almost exactly the same throughout the spectrum, there are gaps in 'mental care utilization' between political party affiliation. Democrats and Independents are 'significantly more likely' to have engaged the services of a Mental Health Care Professional, than are the humorless and sexually frustrated Republicans who have 'substantially higher unmet healthcare needs.' Naturally Bobby is very thorough, he has examined trillions of words on the met and unmet mental health needs of the average US Citizen.

"Liberals," Bobby suggests, "who tend to be less inclined toward system justification and more critical of social and economic inequality, may recognize external factors (like political stress or systemic injustice) as contributing to their distress. This critical awareness may make them more willing to frame their feelings as a health issue requiring treatment."

So there you have it, the more liberal minded in our number should end their addiction to therapists as a substitute for bacon, egg and cheese sandwiches, they should allow their passions free rein, stop moaning about the debilitating affects of irony on happiness, find a unifying hat color, raise the banners and march.

Agonism, Chivalry and Megalomaniacal Fatheads

Light Snow

There's a distinction between an enemy and an adversary. I'd like to argue that Baxter and I prefer chivalry, and then the Romans with their iron discipline and blank wall mindset came along. All the same, even if it's just holes in our bones that chivalry fills with the strawberry cream of decency Baxter and I like to think we go big time for honor, courtesy, gallantry and protecting the weak. Otherwise we too would become prone to the fatheaded-ness currently devouring what remains of the Republican Party, large numbers of males obsessed with warrior look alike games and much of the Democratic Party here in the USA.

Cicero would have called our strawberry cream filling, a Magnanimous Filling. It's a filling that would include disdain to the point of contempt of wealth, pain, death and trivialities. For Cicero a magnanimous spirit focused on the glory of Rome, the moral fiber of stable, resolute and unwavering will. It's a soul too large to be constrained by self interest. And I think, to cheer him up, I recently reminded Baxter that Mark Anthony had Cicero killed for being too liberal in his thinking about the value of the Roman Republic to the well-being of the Roman Citizens, rich and poor. 

Ask any Latin Teacher, even girl Latin Teachers, and they'll tell you that John Locke of the Enlightenment, got most of his ideas for his understanding of liberal from Cicero. So No! It's not at all ridiculous to think of Marcus Tullius Cicero as Liberal. Or Cato the Elder for that matter.

What is a Liberal?

Cicero, who died in 43 BC when he was 63 years old, would have given you a number of possible signposts to the meanings in the word Liberal. Cicero believed in the balance between the Rule of Law and Liberty. He was a big fan of Private Property, he believed in what was called a balanced government. For him that meant Consuls, Senators, Assemblymen. His ideal state leaned heavily on giving power to Consuls and Senators who were mostly members of established family landowning hierarchies and military heroes. Roman Assemblymen were less reputable, often property-less citizen members of Roman society, they saw to the rule of law, they were often organized by traditional tribes, each with slightly different ways of doing things. And then there was the Council of the Plebs for the common people, or what the US Constitution still calls "We the People." But Cicero, like Cato the Elder heartily distrusted the Plebs. Both Cicero and Cato, despite their shared understanding of magnanimity in the word Statesman would have considered something like Democracy, as briefly practiced by Athens, a recipe for a Mob Rule by We the People, a guaranteed loss of property, slaves and possibly even Senators would have to wash their own dishes.

A new bright spark in the word liberal emerged during the Enlightenment. John Locke, an odd looking young man, who amongst other things was a physician who wanted to be a writer, did a lot of thinking for the First Earl of Shaftesbury, a man called Anthony Ashley Cooper who became the Leader of the English Whig Party. As a physician Locke had saved Shaftesbury's life. It was to become a close bond between brains and a member of a land owning Hierarchy who had political ambitions which is the polite way of saying Anthony Ashley Cooper wanted power and didn't much care how he got it.

Worth getting behind Anthony Cooper, understanding him as devious, politically slippery and destined to go far on his way up the greasy pole. He'd been a kings man at the beginning of the 1642 to 1651 attempt by the middle class to take monarchy down a peg or two. An attempt called The Great Rebellion (1642 to 1651) or The English Civil War. When the English King, Charles the First, was beheaded in 1649, Anthony Ashley Cooper, sidled up and found a place amongst Oliver Cromwell's supporters. Then when Cromwell died of natural causes and his son wasn't up to the job of Lord Protector, England decided they wanted their King back. Anthony Ashley Cooper moved on quickly, he probably read a lot into the Royalists' disinterment and beheading of Oliver Cromwell's corpse. Cooper became a Whig as opposed to a Tory.

Whigs wanted the King to have less power. The Tories clung to the idea that Kings had been chosen by god to rule The English in an unlimited and traditional way. The Whig preference of limiting the power of kings put the Whigs in the Liberal Camp on such subjects as Rule of Law, Limited Government, Liberty and Yes, private property because you can't have Liberty if the King's Toadies are allowed to take stuff away from you when it suits them, that's what Warlords do.

And Lo, John Locke, who, to quote the Icelandic Proverb was a man with a book in his belly, and even if John Locke might have been a little bit too progressive to be popular, he was just the right chap for the job of advising Anthony Ashley Cooper who in 1677 was titled Lord Ashley, he was Whig Chancellor of the Exchequer, in charge of the nations money. 

What did John Locke add to the word Liberal other than the content his often rejected book, Treatise on Human Understanding? Well, in essence, he added the authority of The Enlightenment to the ingredients of meaning which are included in the idea of "A Legitimate Other" and which in many ways are summarized by the words of hope and passion "We the People" as enshrined in the Constitution of the United States.

So when you go to bed at night, best not to forget Locke's contribution to a Liberal Hegemony's approach to slavery and child labor, a grasp of the sentience in animals, religious tolerance, as well as his opinions on the accumulation of wealth, along with his positive views of allowing supply and demand for money to determine the value of money which he wrote about in his 1691 "Considerations on the consequences of the Lowering of Interest and the Raising of the Value of Money." 

Liberal Democracy

Pond and Ice

It's the same old problem. "Why can't we all get along." The answer, "We can't," seems disappointing. "We're not meant to," is no better but possibly true. The other answer, "Kill them all and let God decide" seems far too Roman, kind of pathetic and very expensive. Another possibility, "Liberal Democracy," might seem a little limp for a paradox I've yet to place in the dictionary of Symbolic Order.

When thinking about Mouffe's perspective on life in general the charm is the way she distinguishes between Populism and Fundamentalism. It's very much a perspective that replaces the grind and convictions of metanarratives with a pluralism she would like to be able to describe as Agonistic Pluralism. Agonistic here means passion filled, combative, argumentative, impolite, rude contestants in the struggle for hegemony who share an allegiance to the ethics and political principles of liberty and equality.

Chantal's understanding of pluralism is on the same shelf as smiling Jean-François Lyotard's multiplicity of competing narratives, sometimes thought of as coexisting authorities. And Oh Yes, there's always the example of James Madison's two contributions to the US Constitution.  His coexisting and equal branches of government. His other contribution, he didn't like owning slaves, he thought it a "sad blot" on created equal, but he had to own property to keep his plantation profitable, what else mattered.

The Mouffe/Laclau understanding of the signifier Fundamentalism sees it as a complete rejection of Pluralism. Fundamentalists determine only one legitimate authority. More politely, fundamentalism mobilizes passion in a manner that results in reducing and then eliminating political space. This Eternal Order, is usually more convincing when decreed by a God or maybe a Squillionaire, rather than by a man.

Fundamentalism for Mouffe et al is a fixed ideology. Populism is not a fixed ideology, it's nothing to do with an ideology, it's a way of doing politics that builds, or clarifies the frontier between underdog interest groups, or the "The People" on the one side and the kings, queens and princes or "The Elites" on the other side. Populism, or "Us against Them," because it's not an ideology but a way of doing politics can raise passion for a single eternal order or for a pluralist order, it doesn't matter which it's still populism, and it's populism that puts the pussy foot into Elites. Big crowds get you elected and big crowds string you up from the palace balcony and make you pay taxes. 

Mouffe's point is that when you're a dominant elite in a cultural hegemony tied around something like the American Dream, the passions of populism need to be either won over, redirected or discouraged.  And it's just not good enough to be simple minded about "The People." We are not a lump or a blot, we, as the signified other, the subjects of hegemony, or The People, are the material out of which  a cultural hegemony's focus group consultants and political theorists, build and then manipulate a political construction that might manufacture the right sort of passion.

How easy it should be! But in reality we people look more like a symbolic order of meanings than a grammatically cohesive class. We are chaotic from moment to moment and we should be understood as a chain of equivalences linked not by steel but by a collection of unsatisfied demands and unidentified holes or even by a single dissatisfaction such as the price of coffee or a tax on vodka. The political construction the hegemony builds to secure our passions increasingly fails to interpret and then represent our interests.

I'd argue that one of the results of this failure is the flatulence of Post Irony and Metamodernism with its rejection of irony, its embrace of Tinkerbell's A for Effort and that oscillation between hope a skepticism found in the fairy tales of old that challenge children to reconsider some of their decisions.

Elites Don't Like The People.

Antonio Gramsci, born 1891 died 1937 aged 46

The word Populist continues to cling to a place on the Symbolic Order it laid claim to at the end of 19th Century. In 1891, the year Gramsci was born, for us here in the United States, the word Populist meant "of the people." It was coined by the People's Party, which was a band of farmers who were fed up with bankers, corrupt corporate interests and financial elites, but mostly they were pissed off with bankers who soon enough became synonymous with New Yorkers.

Meanwhile in the Russia of the late 19th Century, along with a Temperance Movement that had resulted in an unpopular tax on Vodka, the word Populist emerged within the context of a political movement within the restless youth of upper and middle class society, as well as in the class of Russian political theorists and the host of Russian novelists. This movement was called the Narodniks. Narodnik still means "Of the People."

One of the results of Narodnik Activism was Tsar Alexander II's Emancipation of the Serfs. Serfs, or The Peasants, in Russia had hitherto been the property of landowners. A bold political move by the Tsar, which led to problems for landowners because former serfs where finding it difficult to satisfy the Redemption Payments required of them to compensate landowners for loss of property.  

It didn't take long for the meaning contained in the phrase common as muck troublemakers to inch its why toward the word Populist. Soon enough the words simple, naïve, immature, tasteless, Hitler, Mussolini, socialist, communist and a bunch of other signifiers, and their meanings, cuddled up to Populist. The result, in the Symbolic Order of the upper echelons, Populism, or "Of the People," was a big red boo-boo on the face of civilization, it was a "Hell No" amongst after dinner port drinkers and anyone who'd just bought a new car or a pair of good boots.

Our recently elected Lady of the Light, Chantal Mouffe, has spent much of her life illuminating a Post-Structural analysis of discourse. Her own place on the Symbolic Order requires us to talk about a man with great hair who spent the last eleven or so years of his life in one of Mussolini's jails. The Point, grit your teeth, grow up, Antonio Gramsci's Cultural Hegemony is not a polite term for an obscene Epsteinian Escapade. The word Culture, not Killing, is the key

Cultural Hegemony is a theory about how a dominant social elite, class, or group, maintains power not through violence, force or economic coercion but through "ideological and cultural leadership that secures the 'spontaneous consent' of the masses." And here, it's safe to put 'spontaneous consent' very close to the word Irony on Gramsci's Symbolic Order 

Be brave! While most of us seem to worship elites, kiss up to them, grovel for favors, dream of bringing home a millionaire, a second home in a Ulaanbaatar suburb near a golf course, try to remember that pretend as the elites might try, let them wear the beaky hat backwards all they want, elites don't like the help. They don't like sitting next to the help, they don't like to shop in the same shops as the help, they don't even like to fly on the same airplanes as the help.

In Antonio Gramsci's case, he followed a family tradition, he was arrested, but not for embezzlement like his dad, Antonio was arrested for conspiracy and incitement to civil war. At his trial the prosecutor summed up the purpose of the charges against him this way: "for twenty years we must stop this brain from working."

While in jail Antonio Gramsci wrote 30 notebooks and 3000 pages of very original contributions to political theory, including his thoughts on the creepy Fredrick Winslow Taylor otherwise known as Mr. Scientific Job Analysis, and that 5'10" shithead from Springwells Township in Michigan called Mr. Mass Production Henry Ford who took an axe to the meaning of the word craftsmanship, ruined the word brand and probably created that other imbecilic tool the world wide web refers to as influencers.

Ford and Taylor contributed mightily to the direction of a hegemony that began to flounder when Bill and Hillary Clinton crossed a picket line at a museum in Ohio and went on to lead a US Administration that for 8 years gave up on the working class, passed the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act that sent black men to jail for giving a policeman a funny look so William could fulfill a 'campaign' promise and it was a Presidency that produced a myth in the Democratic Party which was adopted by the Obama administration and I will paraphrase: "The only thing workers want out of their short life of service is a regular job, the odd day off and the occasional week of paid holiday." 

Trouble at Mill, not duty or reason but a paradox called Liberal Demcracy

Essay by Chantal Mouffe, 2000

Us against them is populism. It clarifies passions, encourages clear collective identities, and such a shame those clear collective identities by themselves alone and unaided usually fail to manifest a clear and civilized discourse which results in productive compromise. A pretty story with color pictures and happier endings isn't the answer, nor a bland monotony of color, faith, height and diet. Never has been.

Why? The last rational person who gave serious consideration to time for us people being a linear concept was August Comte, the father of Sociology and he died in 1857 when he was 59 years old, lucky chap. Instead of a line, wiggly or otherwise, what we have to maintain a vibrant, open and free democracy is an enduring, tragic, conflicting, messy pluralism of competing hegemonic interests in conflict with each other and those interests occasionally changing places without ever achieving a solution. There is no closure, there is no straight line, there is no boldly going where no man has been before. Society is a series of institutions one of which contains the process for determining leadership.

One argument suggests you can't institutionalize conflict unless the adversaries, however many there may be, are deemed legitimate. Should one party invest forty years in de-legitimizing the other party, then, as the old saying goes: "there's trouble at mill." 

Chantal Mouffe's position on the central role of passion and conflict in the democratic process is clear. She does not see a working liberal democracy as a committee of the ruling class, but suspects that's what democracy may have been replaced with. Her Agonistic Pluralism which provides the theoretical framework for an understanding of a liberal democracy that works more effectively to represent us people accepts conflict between groups, not reason, as both a cohesive and clarifying driving force that produces constructive expressions and welcomes "trouble at Mill." Agonism, Mouffe's position, as opposed to Antagonism, describes the enemy as a legitimate adversary against whom to mobilize. Passion is the driving force of mobilization, a passion to vote, not a duty to vote.

The Mill in question is a settling power structure attempting to return to a "work or starve" mindset that encourages the uncertainty of fear in a society, not hope. This produces a degree of obedience, but also it results in increasingly short term, ill-considered, yet given the circumstances apparently reasonable if temporary solutions to enduring problems. 

The Skeptic Cicero, looked for Virtue, Justice and Wisdom in a Statesman. He liked to see dignity, temperance, generosity and a magnanimous heart in a political leader. Mark Antony, a would be emperor, had him killed, which just about sums up the power hungry

 

 

Them and Us

Fungi on Old Apple Tree

Let's dive in, thrash around in the dawn of Post Irony before it disappears, and see how the New Modern might affect and ultimately effect the regimes of truth, language and the structures of power in a society of people. But before we do anything we have to enter the world of Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau. Why? Because they are a point of focus with enviable names.

Mouffe is a Belgian Political Theorist, a world traveler, a critic of Deliberative Democracy, a contributor to the Essex School of Discourse Analysis which is a field where the post structuralist Symbolic Order figures bountiful.

Ernesto Laclau, an Argentinian Political Theorist, he was a Philosopher, one of the many brave 'inventors' of Post Marxism, a field amongst many fields that attempts to recall the real through a materialist dialectic in the search for the concrete and in the process pisses a lot of hardcore Marxists off. Laclau died eleven years ago, he was 78, he was buried in Seville Spain. Mouffe is still with us, she's 82.

Mouffe's critique of Deliberative Democracy is where we start. And here there's a confusion to be mastered. An idea is an idea until it's not. Carl Schmidt might have been a nasty little man, it didn't mean that in 1933, as a well respected constitutional scholar he didn't have a point to make about the Weimer Republic having become a new constitutional creature when the leader of a minority party in a recent election was appointed Chancellor by the duly elected President of the Weimer Republic. And very true, much of Schmidt's scholarship into the constitutional use of Emergency Powers and the engineering of the Enabling Act that legitimized the Nazi takeover of the Weimer Republic has been adopted by the current US Republican Administration, but that's still not the point. The point, whether right or wrong, that Carl Schmidt wanted to make and the point that Chantal Mouffe still wants to make was that Deliberative Democracy was badly flawed, it didn't work and the question was why didn't it work. 

Both Schmidt, Mouffe and possible Laclau had concluded that the Ideal of a Rational Consensus is Utopian, it's dangerous, it totally fails to account for the actual nature of politics which is Conflict and Passion. Go ahead try to suppress these two central features of politics in favor of neutral, rational, cleanly structured, beautifully comprehensible Symbolic Orders that produce constructive dialogues and see what happens to stability. Neighbors start throwing stones and stealing signs.

And you're going to love this, Mouffe would have some mean, and possibly very ironic things to say about Post Irony and the whole post-political regime of the sweet little well educated Metamodernist cottage in the country. Mouffe has an Agonistic Perspective. For those who care, and despite other possible associations on the Symbolic Order, Agonistic is at minimum an acknowledgement of a "Them" and an "Us." In the middle it's a "take it outside." At the maximum it's a "bomb the bastards."

So yes we're dealing with a rare and an unusual person, a thinker who brushes her teeth when she feels like it and to hell with the Symbolic Pecking Orders of Academia and to hell with under forty-something pundits trying to pick up pullets by writing for the New Statesman, The Atlantic and/or The Guardian.

The two Jacques and the trade winds of French Poststructuralism

Giant Moon

 The Decentered Subject. Yes indeed, if you don't count beatniks, short skirts, bell bottoms and boots, a Decentered Subject is one of the causes of people putting things like the word Post in-front of a word like Modernism or Structuralism. Within the Lacanian view it's not that hard, we are the fickle subjects of forces beyond our control. For a supporter of the prefixing of the word post to structural, those forces include language, social structure, discourse as well as heated argument.  We, each one of us, are internally divided, there is definitely an enemy within, we are fractured, more contradictory than we are coherent. In short our well packed prelinguistic suitcase flew open years ago when we were running to catch the train.

Source of Meaning. We, as a you and an I, might make the odd word up like cuddlebunny, but you or I, neither of us are the origin of meaning. We are closer to a repository of crossword clues. The meaning that flows through us is more like an effect, as in the "effect of the weather is a change in my mood" and safe to say this effect is a consequence of using language in a society that talks. An English speaking pig goes Oink, a Polish pig offers a full blown Chrum and that's just the way it is.

Jacques Derrida, made a word up so that he could encompass the idea of differ and defer. Differ as: not the same as each other. And Defer as: putting off so that further consideration might occur. Derrida's word, différance, is kind of like the phrase "Give it time, let it come by freight." And why, because when the subject is decentered there is no transcendental center, or confident and obnoxious decision maker, which leads to an instability baked into the structure of language that according to poststructuralist thinkers you and I should take for granted and relish, rather than put on uniforms, arm ourselves and march around with sticks pointing at people.  

In 1966, Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan, both ambitious, career orientated young males with great hair and Napoleonic eyes had charged themselves with the immense task of introducing French Poststructuralist Thought to Baltimore's John Hopkins University at a conference called "The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man." In Baltimore, Derrida and Lacan, spent much of their time addressing what happened to your writing when you died, which for the pragmatic children of William James might have been a little on the psychedelic side. But Derrida had a point to make. When you are alive you're present, you're there, ready with questions, ready with answers, ready to maintain a presence. When you're dead you're not there. Which means that metaphysically, you being alive are connected to the symbolic order, you are part of meaning now, but when you're dead you yourself are not part of meaning, which is why the title of your book or play, along with any memory of you, is a tombstone. Dream on Shelley, go ahead weep for Adonais, send thousands more to detention, it still doesn't mean you're not a couple of bones and a few teeth under a stone slab in Rome, Italy. 

Lacan and Derrida's most wonderful debate, some might say clash, had to do with how the Symbolic Order treated the word Signifier. The debate has been referenced as "The Purloined Letter Debate of 1975." The Purloined Letter is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe, it's in the detective story from Paris genre. The famous detective August Dupin had got himself involved in a whole series of tricky situations that involved searching for clues about a suggestive and possibly gossipy letter that had been removed from the Queen's private quarters and replaced with an innocent how you feeling time of day letter that had nothing salacious or remotely interesting to say about anything.

For our two heroes, Lacan and Derrida, Poe's short story was about what the letter represented in the wider scheme of a decentered subject in an unstable symbolic order. Lacan chose to argue that the letter as a signifier - a piece of paper with words written on it that signified something -  always arrived at a destination. Derrida rolled his sparkling eyes and pointed out that his fellow poststructuralist had failed to take notice of the folly of forcing the metaphysics of presence - that the thing, whatever it is, has a center - on a decentered symbolic order. Lacan had apparently leapt to the comfortably centering of presence held dear by some psychoanalytic structures, such as a sensible Ego, and as a result Lacan had not only failed to see the obvious instabilities in the structure of language, he's also failed to embrace the tentative nature inherent in the signifier/signified relationship where there is no metaphysical presence because there is no center to be signified.

In other words for Derrida, the letter, as a vessel of meaning, didn't have to arrive at its destination and indeed the fact that it might not have done, raised a whole new can of meanings which got itself muddled up even more when the great detective August Dupin forged a letter to trap the evil minister of state, save the queen from disgrace and cause maidens throughout the 1840's to break out in hives at the prospect of having to wait 90 years for the vote.

Lacan's source of Desire

Spider Web Catches and Gives Meaning

Identification is Creation. Stay strong and let's know what Jacques Lacan might have meant when he talked about the structure of language being tied to an understanding that permitted him to interpret the Psyche, a pit where the unconscious and primal writhed around in unholy complaint.

It always seems as though the business of being a human being starts off messy in its unutterred silence. It's not messy. Until it comes into the world it's a like a well packed suitcase, all neat and tidy in a small orderly space, and as an entropy expressing itself it sounds like an opportunity looking to escape, it needs a hole in the fence, it embraces disorder and it becomes one of us. Over the years, stuff get's lost, bad habits like the metaphysical absolute of irony get acquired, along with disease, wrinkles, rat poison instead of collagen, impossible fantasies, figments of the imagination, heart conditions and aneurysms. So no wonder people have yearned for a structure with which to interpret the language of the creature that lurks within, or the unconscious, sometimes called the Psyche, the Ego, it's a long list, each attempt at definition an inspiration behind a wonderful disparagement.

We all remember being called puerile and cretinous by shell-shocked teachers of Latin and Greek, but very few of us, I think, even as infants, have been called unmediated and prelinguistic and yet that's how the illiterate within, the raw unconscious, has been described by those fluent in the Symbolic Order, which is another way of signifying the mental range of ideas associated with the structure or the language of the unconscious. This mental range isn't simply did the cat sit on the mat or didn't it? No, this mental range of ideas includes language, law, culture, tradition, social structure, the weather and everything else. It's all there rolling around in the unconscious doing devious things, upsetting a lifestyle and confusing the emotions.

Let's call up a coherent self and give out the name Ego. This is the chap or chappess who does what he or she can to run the unconscious. The Ego is the one to open a dialogue with. In our coffee clutch, or whatever, we identify our feelings within the context of a Symbolic Order, which is still a mental range of ideas that includes language, law, culture, tradition, social structure, the weather and everything else. In the process of identifying a feeling we give it a signifier or a word that creates it in our minds and we start adding meaning to this signified feeling we've identified with a word. This stream of meanings includes where that word lies within the entire Symbolic order. 

And soon enough, as dialogue continues, an unfillable void is observed, it's a great big hole Lacan called "lack," something missing, that needs to be filled. One of the titles that's been given to "lack" is the Source of Desire. Other things too, many of them the Ego might be reluctant to discuss because the "I" as manager of the unconscious, inventor of words and head communicator with the outside world isn't much of anything. The point is "lack" is structural, it's been there since first breath, if "Lack" were history Arendt's understanding of history would suit it. And there again, a lot of lack-pot-holes, have been filled by an immodest creator of words with buckets of make believe.

The color of structuralism

Barn

A good year for end of times yellow. Don't kid yourself about all this cowardice stuff, that all stemmed from the Spanish Inquisition when heretics where marked as yellow, same with Jews, traitors and anyone else who despite being frail and weak and usually a minority, didn't buckle under. When you think structure, think yellow and the way meaning slides through language.

Our word yellow comes from the Indo European, and in my view more civilized, side of our language where it meant to shine or gleam. My own preference is gleam and I'll tell you why. There's a flycatcher round here called a Phoebe. But there's no way a Phoebe's chest is allowed to be called white, because as a devil who has chased out generations of barn swallows, The Phoebe is both still and she gleams in dark places. There's Femme Fatale green to a Phoebe's white. Not to mention the associations between white, devil, Zanzibar and aimless wandering.

Anyway, Structuralism was fond in its belief that language had created a universal and stable structure of meaning, and would have described a Phoebe as a flycatcher with a white chest

The Story of Action: Many Beginnings but No End.

Late Yellows

Causally and logically linked in a sequence of unfolding, is a predetermined telos that offers the stability so many demand of history. Such an unfolding offered a trusted and reliable stability, but Isadora Wing in her individual life wanted a more liberating experience.

Arendt's contribution to stability was more like a ruptured, eventual, contingency driven by the unpredictable freedom of human beings. In Arendt's view the end of human history would be the disappearance of us people. In no way, shape or form is freedom stable.

Isadora Wing was the heroine mighty bored with Mr. Wing in Erica Jong's Fear of Flying. Mr. Wing was a Freudian. The boyfriend, called Adrian Goodlove, was bathed in the establishment of mid twentieth century British Psychoanalytical Society, his Mrs. Wing gave him an opportunity to both explore and engage in the Freudian stables of libido, repressed desire and transference. But Adrian had an interest in the insights of the Frenchman Jacques Lacan who was promoting the idea of desire, lust, boinking, and the ancillary details, as structures in a psyche maintained by language and narrative, a story. Desire, as tied to language rather than mechanics of baby making, easily slid into a desire for recognition. Mrs Wing was a neurotic and a Published Poet who taught creative stuff, it was hard work being an authentic voice in an inauthentic world dominated by well paid shrinks, one of them dastardly in his lack of professionalism.

Tempting to believe that Isadora would be as putty in the hands of an English fiend called Adrian. But no. He turned out needy, domineering, he'd taken the connection Jacques Lacan had made between physical desire in a psyche that was both shaped and structured by language as a desire for recognition by the other a little too literally. It made Adrian dull as nails. Isadora's passion to slide into  wordless and mindless exchanges of bodily fluids on a psychiatrist couch or anywhere else got lost to a clever translation and went unrequited.

History and freedom are messy

The Disciple in All of Us

Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker

Metamodern Oscillation, feelings, truth, freedom and lies.

There's a lot of words here, so let's talk about Preppers, Survivalists, and just accept that in the good old Postmodern World of ten years ago, when we were all Ironic, cigarette smoking and proud of our morpheme laden Metaphysical Attitude, we were content to define preppers as not only weird, heavily armed, underground dwelling and scary, but as Woke Postmodernists in Good Standing we were also obliged to think of these fellow citizens as engaged in a doomed reaction to a Melancholy Critique of our society.

These days of course we're allowed to use words like dim-witted or moronic, even autistic as long as we place the blame on the medical profession, but we are learning to accept our status as an underclass in an oscillation that's placed an A for Effort as the only viable grading of opinion. Which is the cynical way of suggesting that Metamodern Structure of Feelings that promote a regular oscillation between naughty and nice would have found a home in Goebbels' back office behind the door which reads "Moving On." And why?

In a Society, the Self is not the Project, Society is the project, which if true, does rather suggest that orientating the self toward society is the project. Hence Freedom, Truth, Feelings, a mix of realities that can only be brought into a unison through a series of lies, or if you prefer myths that work to create belief through the feelings of faith. It's just a sad fact God doesn't work so well anymore.

How lucky Can-Bobby is. He doesn't feel. No wonder Schlegel became a religious nut. I prefer Ironic Seriousness as the coverall for the Metamodernist Mind.

Is Freedom an Oscillation Beyond Irony?

Step Out

Let's reassure ourselves of a definition and then ask a question. The reassurance : What does Postmodernism mean? The Question : What's irony got to do with a definition of Postmodernism? The simple answer is in this question: What is Knowingness when meaning is unstable? Then when all that's sorted out there's a judgement to be made on the value or otherwise of stability's relationship with freedom. And out of that judgement honest lies and deceit are born. 

Let's get posh and posit a Metaphysical Attitude by pottering on back to another German Idealist, he was a well fed man who was 56 when he died in 1829, he went by the wonderful name of Friedrich Schlegel. In his youth he was a big fan of Kant's Transcendental Idealism and the excitement of the Enlightenment, as he aged the poor chap became a Christian Nationalist. Schlegel, despite his frailties, in his exploration of language discovered morphemes - snippets of meaning - in the German word Ironie (which is the English word Irony).These morphemes suggested that irony should be thought of as a Metaphysical Attitude. In other words, irony reflected a deep down understanding that there were areas of thinking that no human being was really capable of capturing. Such areas included ultimate truth.  "Ultimate Truth" when used ironically, spoken with a tone of Irony, according to Schlegel was self-referential. It was bathos, it was the one little remark that turned a reach for truth, a great work of literature, a lifetime's achievement into an amusing nonsense.  But Schlegel was a tad pompous and suggested Irony placed the Artist above the work, a false modesty, rather than a "don't believe a word of it." Which for Schlegel became a faith in the form of his belief in the Roman Church. 

The refreshingly slender Jean-François Leotard in his The Postmodern Condition (1979), introduced a definition of Postmodernism that described it as "an incredulity toward metanarrative." Pretty damn spiffy and very La Belle Dame Sans Merci of him to come up with something so sprightly and Gallic. We Anglo Saxons with our stubby fingers, promptly contributed wide-eyed disbelief, incredulity, to the morphemes in the usage of the word irony. It was attached to our idea of wit, our grasp of charades.

Soon enough we sulked, we'd already stolen the word pastiche from the Italians and produced the accusation that Irony in Postmodernism has suborned the youth and while psychologists welcomed the business there was nothing they could do about it when the patient started throwing coffee tables at their girlfriends. Naturally political interests saw a future in a realignment of reality that suited the emotionally hungry.

Wordsmiths struggled on through the happy days of the new perspectives they'd found in the controversies of Postmodernism before being persuaded to employ their imaginations to produce the beautiful notion Can-Bobby calls The Oscillation Beyond Irony. He introduces Metamodernism or Post Irony through the work of two cultural theorists, as Postmodernist sociologists have come to be called. Two men, Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker, who describe a "structure of feeling" characterized by a constant oscillation between two opposite poles. 

These opposite poles are the distance between the enthusiasm, sincerity and doubts of Modernism - which followed the convictions of the Enlightenment - and at the other pole of this structure of feeling there's the irony, skepticism and doubts of Postmodernism. This new view of the world the Ancient Greeks would have continued to call skepticism is placed in Schlegel's morphemes of this word Metamodernism or Post Irony and will one day receive a chapter in the Book of Irony